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The effect of repeated reactivations on memory specificity in infancy
D F Hitchcock1, C Rovee-Collier
1Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|August 1, 1996
Summary
Infant memory reactivation shows specificity decreases with repeated retrieval. Contextual cues are forgotten slower than specific cues, impacting memory detail over time.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Infant Memory
Background:
- Infant memory reactivation is highly specific to original encoding cues and context.
- Memory retrieval failure occurs if cues or context differ during reminding.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if memory specificity decreases with repeated reactivation in young infants.
- To determine how cue and context specificity change over multiple retrieval attempts.
Main Methods:
- Three-month-old infants trained on a mobile conjugate reinforcement task.
- Memory was allowed to become forgotten, followed by multiple reactivation treatments.
- Final reminder involved either a changed cue or context.
Main Results:
- Context specificity was eliminated faster than cue specificity across repeated reactivations.
- The number of retrievals needed to eliminate specificity was influenced by memory age.
- Older memories required fewer retrievals to lose specificity.
Conclusions:
- Different memory attributes (cue vs. context) become inaccessible at different rates.
- Repeated retrieval and memory age lead to less detailed memories.
- This process may contribute to reconstructive memory development in humans.